


A Prayer in the Silence

by MartyrJoan



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Blood and Violence, Colonist Shepard, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Post-Horizon (Mass Effect), War Hero Shepard, Yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:42:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25644466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MartyrJoan/pseuds/MartyrJoan
Summary: A post-Horizon Shenko fic.Raechel Shepard has lost so many core aspects of her identity: her family and innocence in the batarian raid on Mindoir, her own life and autonomy on Alchera when Cerberus rebuilt her as they saw fit, and on Horizon when she felt the sharp loss of the man she loved.In the wake of it all, she tries desperately to remember herself, and to remember her love.
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard, Kaidan Alenko/Shepard
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	A Prayer in the Silence

**Author's Note:**

> A couple warnings: There's some descriptions of gore in the beginning that might be a little difficult. Also some minor suicidal ideation throughout -- though I promise it ends better. I don't want to write angst for the sake of angst.
> 
> Wow, I haven't written Mass Effect trilogy fanfiction since ME3 came out and I was a teenager posting on ffnet. I guess the fact that I'm here now is proof to how powerful Horizon is to all fans of Virmire survivors. 
> 
> This is the story of Raechel Shepard, a Colonist and War Hero. She was an Engineer class before Cerberus rebuilt her and gave her biotic abilities -- making her a Vanguard. The fic touches a bit on the invasiveness of this change.

After the slaughter on Mindoir, Raechel Shepard, then sixteen years old, was pulled outfrom beneath the slime of a melted corpse, blood and flesh and fluid sprayed through the yellowing underbrush and coating the large roots of the tree that hung over them. There was not enough of this person left to identify them -- some hair clinging to scattered pieces of scalp was enough to tell they were a brunette. One of her brothers had been hit with that strange batarian whip, too. He had melted the same way. 

The hands that pulled her out were asking her if she was wounded. Was it one person, two? They were asking her name, and if she could walk. They were trying to get her to look this way and that, putting hands on her arm and her shoulder and her lower back and --

She punched them in the face. Clean and square, her form good despite it all, just as her eldest brother had taught her (and he had later lost a tooth from). She had landed another punch right on the jaw and was reeling back for a third one when she stopped, arm falling to her side like a dead weight. 

“Hey, hey!” They said in surprise, recoiling slightly. 

It was just one person. And they were _human_.This person was a human. Dark skin and kind eyes -- just two of them, not the four of batarians -- and gleaming armor on their chest. There was a gun at their hip, but it was stowed. Raechel’s eyes flicked over it -- the safety was on. 

She thought about taking it. 

“You’re safe. I’m with the Alliance military,” they said, voice calm and even as they grimaced and rubbed their jaw. “We’re here to help. Do you know of anyone else -- any survivors -- in this area?”

She blinked. Realized she was hot -- was that sweat, or all the melted flesh of the stranger clinging to her? It was late afternoon. She had been walking the fields just this morning, leading the cattle to the back pastures where the grass was tall and still green, despite the sweltering summer. Her favorite calf was just beginning to eat solid foods, clumsily pulling at the weeds and dropping half of them in just seconds. Her head was pounding. Is there still screaming? She can't tell. Is the calf dead? That was just this morning.

She shook her head. “No, I -- I haven’t seen anyone for…” She looked around the sparse treeline, wondering how she hadn’t managed to get further into the woods, wondering if she was alive at all. “I covered myself in the -- in all of it, to just get away, so they wouldn’t see me. I heard someone far off and I just hid and --” She let out a strangled sob. “I don’t even know who this _is._ ”

And then, she was running her hands through her hair, across her ripped clothes, trying to tear off the hair and bits of flesh and chips of bone still clinging to her. She was erratic, yelping as though she was stepped on. There was something in her hair. Bone, it felt like. Maybe a tooth. Her fingers were tangled in the mess of it now. “I don’t know who they were. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

This Alliance person was whispering something into an earpiece, saying something about backup. “I have a kid here, Ernesto. She seems scared to hell and back.” Their voice now sounded rough, heavy with urgency. 

“It’s okay,” they said, looking to her again. 

“Did you kill them all?” She asked, fury some new bubbling thing in her chest.

“Most of them were gone before we got here, I’m sorry. But we’ve got some of them, okay? They're not going to hurt you. You’re safe.” They hesitated. “Can I give you some medigel? I can hand you the pack and let you apply it yourself, alright?”

She nodded slowly, and did so, finding the place where she had sliced her shoulder open on a barbed fence sometime earlier as she had fled. The medigel was cool to the touch, stinging slightly before relief came. She rolled her shoulder, testing it out. Her eyes felt unfocused. None of this was happening to _her_. She was sure.

“My name is Commander Tanitoluwa Opeyemi.” They smile, and she feels like she can breathe again. “You can call me Tani, okay? What’s your name?”

She took deep, gulping breaths, hands wringing each other now because she did not dare feel whatever other scraps of death were still on her body. “My name…” 

She sat down, and Tani crouched down with her, as if in sync with her movements. 

“My name is Raechel, like the wife of Jacob and sister of Leah. Rabbi Halevi said that...he said...it’s a name of compassion and mercy. He said that she-- ” Her shoulders shook, all of her shook. The words were coming out mangled, tears spilling down, but it did not feel like _her_ cheeks or _her_ face or _her_ tears at all. “But in the English translations of the Torah it’s spelled without an ‘e’, but mine has an ‘e’ and my parents never told me _why_ and I -- Are they here...? Mom --?” 

“Hey, Raechel,” Tani whispered. “It's okay. Look at me now, Raechel. That's a beautiful name. You have a beautiful name. Tell me more about yourself.”

She breathed a few times and straightened her shoulders, eyes focused on the Alliance emblem emblazoned on the commander’s armor. Then, she looked up, meeting Tani’s dark eyes.

“ _My name is Raechel Shepard._

_I am sixteen years old._

_My parents are farmers._

_I have four older brothers._

_I like to play piano._

_I can’t cook._

_I’ve never been to Earth._ ”

It felt like recalling another person’s life, like she was in a play and fishing through her subconscious for the lines. But , she looked at her bloody hands and the red hair grazing her shoulder, she looked at the ground of Mindoir, the only world she had ever known...and she tried to remember that she _was_ Raechel. This was no part to play. Just her own.

She looked up at Tani.

“Can I join the Alliance?”

At that, as if in disbelief, the Commander laughed, and gently placed a hand on her knee. “Sure you can. Once you’re eighteen. But you’re still a kid. You’ve still got some of your life to live, Raechel.”

* * *

  
  


Those words of identity carried her through the years as she grew stronger, as she donned Alliance uniforms and trudged through boot camp. The simple phrases brought her through night terrors that reminded her of Mindoir, through her first jump to FTL, through her first ground missions and holding back the waves of batarians during the attack on Elysium. 

Through every foxhole in war, armored in the battle field or alone in bed, it was her prayer. 

_My name is Raechel Shepard._

_I am eighteen years old...I am twenty-two years old...I am twenty-seven years old…_

_My parents were farmers._

_I had four older brothers._

_I like to play piano._

_I can’t cook._

_I’ve never been to Earth._

Eventually, she went through N7 training in Rio de Janeiro and to the Alliance Headquarters in Vancouver. Her mantra gained a new change, a positive one:

_I have been to Earth. It was beautiful._

She whispered it when crushed by rubble in the Council Chambers on the Citadel after Sovereign’s attack. She was trying to make an opening large enough to slip out from, one of her shoulders dislocated and at least one rib broken. Her breath was hot on her face. “ _My name is Raechel Shepard. I am twenty-nine years old. My parents were farmers…_ ” But she was practically smiling, knowing they had won, knowing the reapers were held off.

Making a gamble and pushing out in such a way that some reinforced steel fell right after she was clear, she stumbled into the bright light flooding through the large windows. She heard some voices and sounds of machinery, of rubble being moved on the other side of a large piece of what must have once been Sovereign. Her mind was racing, hair plastered to her forehead as she charged up and over the wreckage, never losing her footing.

“My name is Raechel Shepard…”

She was looking for her squad, for anyone from the Normandy, yes -- but secretly, she was looking for _him._

“I have been to Earth…”

And just as the crossed over the crest of the rubble, one hand clutching her side, she saw him, the light bright on his dark hair. Their eyes locked, just as her final words danced in the air. “...It was beautiful.”

His words were his own kind of prayer, his voice rough with emotion. “Rae…”

Her smile was larger than life, larger than the pain. And when they ran to each other, it should have been written in the history books, for it was such an event, in the midst of all this death, when Lieutenant Alenko’s arms wrapped around his Commander.

* * *

  
  
  


Months later, she couldn’t even choke the words out when she came to consciousness, buffeted out into the solar winds beyond the wreckage of her ship that had endured so much. An ice world was beneath her, and she could not remember its name. Her body twisted like a marionette jerked about on a line -- some of the other children on Mindoir had made some puppets once, she remembered, when they were small. Her brothers had pretended to kill each others' puppets, and they shook and yanked them about, screaming in a caricature of death before finally flinging them to the ground.

Now she thrashed absurdly, but there was no ground to collapse on. Mindoir felt so far away. Oxygen felt like something she couldn’t remember, lungs squeezed beneath the fist of the universe.

“My name is Raechel Shep --”

And she had drifted away.

* * *

  
  
  


And then, when she had woken on a silver table in some unknown station, mechs shooting at her and her body crackling with energy and pieces she did not understand, the familiar words were on her lips. As she threw a mech with biotics she had never had before, she cried out, eyes closed tight as she hid behind a wall, clutching the pistol in her hands.

“My name is Raechel Shepard.

I am twenty-nine years old…”

But then, when she found someone else, a man with biotics, too, in a uniform that wasn’t Alliance...he told her.

She wasn’t twenty-nine at all.

It was 2185. She was thirty-one.

Was she, really, if she had not been living through those years? Was she a relic yanked through time against the will of G-d?

She buried the thought. Kept fighting. From Cerberus facility to Freedom’s Progress to Omega, seeing some familiar faces in a galaxy that looked like a stranger. She dyed her hair, bleached the red out with all but a shrug. No one really asked, though Joker made, well, a _joke_ about it. Garrus asked if she could dye his fringe next, to which she smirked and asked if he wanted something to distract from the scars.

But, what she told herself, leaning with all of her trembling weight in front of the bathroom mirror was: _If I cannot recognize the galaxy, why should it recognize me?_

Still, though, she said her prayer, her reminder developed fifteen years before on Mindoir. She began repeating it every night before sleep, and every morning upon waking. 

As she stared at the stars blurring by from the window above the bed in her quarters that were too spacious and comfortable to be Alliance standard (and that made her feel worse, oddly enough), she wondered if the reminders helped anything. She wondered if she was a memory more than a person.

* * *

  
  


And then, she was on Horizon. And Lieutenant Alenko’s arms were around his Commander again, but no one would write about it. He wasn’t even a Lieutenant anymore, and she was not his Commander.

_“You’re with Cerberus now?_ ” Kaidan had asked, and it thudded in the empty chamber of her heart like the words _“What was that?”_ from her brother had when the first batarian ships landed on Mindoir.

She knew there was no coming back from it. She knew there were no explanations that would be enough. What she was doing was right, for the right reasons, and she knew that. And yet, she wanted to cry for help, for him to pull her out from the danger like Commander Opeyemi had all those years ago. But Raechel could not find the words to say, “Help me pull this corpse off of me. Help me wash the blood and bone and tendons from my hair. I don’t know whose body this is. I think it is mine.”

He had loved her, he said. Past tense. And she knew, with every certainty, that she did love him, too. Present tense. Even as his eyes filled with pain and disgust. Maybe she loved him even more, then, for not falling in line behind her when she could not answer his questions, because she had them, too.

And yet, as he walked away, it still fucking hurt.

Anger and bile rose in her throat in unison. Garrus tried talking to her, fuming in his own way about how Kaidan refused to listen. His words swam in and out of focus. 

It hurt so fucking bad, everything, like a tsunami had raged and taken her as its claim. It hurt and she hurt with the pain of everything she had lost. As she stood in the empty courtyard waiting for the shuttle, it occurred to her how terribly quiet everything was. Quiet as the space above Alchera (she knew the name of the planet she had died above now). Just a blank vacuum where life should be. 

And maybe that’s what she had been these past few months -- a void. She said her prayers but she did not believe them. She said _I am Raechel Shepard_ , but she did not believe it. Her hair was falling out of its tie now, hanging colorless at her shoulders, like a wig for a play. 

She didn’t know her next line.

But she was alive, wasn’t she? Maybe she should run after Kaidan, she thought. Grab him with these biotics that were still foreign to her in the way that they hummed, and say _I’m alive!_

But what would that change?

She pulled the rest of her hair out of its updo, let it fall around her in the hot sun.

The shuttle landed. She climbed aboard. They flew away.

* * *

  
  
  


When they landed in the shuttle bay, she didn’t pause in her march towards the elevator. Fully armored, fully equipped, she closed the door before the others had even stood up. 

Crashing into her room, she began throwing off her armor, stripping haphazardly and trying to shake her limbs free. Her guns were on the table. Her chestplate was on the couch. Her shoulder plates were on her bed. Legs still armored, she stumbled back up the steps and to her desk. Reaching to her shelves, she grabbed a bottle of brandy -- suddenly glad she had bought two when purchasing Doctor Chakwas’ replacement -- and smashed the top off, not wanting to bother with the cork.

Glass shattered to the ground as the liquid pooled over her hand. The neck was jagged, now. She didn’t care. She lifted it to her face and drank what she could, cutting her cheek as the brandy dribbled out her mouth and down her neck. 

And then, in the midst of this wild display of lapping at the alcohol like some thirsty varren, she glanced to her desk. Her undershirt was stained, cool and wet against her chest as she breathed raggedly. She paused.

Kaidan’s face stared atsomething out of frame from the photograph resting there, just two feet away. A yelp escaped her throat. She crumpled into the chair, embarrassment folding her in half. Head between her armored knees, she stared at the floor -- and screamed.

She kept screaming. Her throat went raw with the effort, and a drop of blood dripped onto the floor from the cut on her cheek. It intermingled with tears and sweat and, fuck, even some of the brandy. Her chest was heaving like a drowning person, harder even than she had cried on Mindoir -- too much in shock back then for the real agony that would plague her for years -- like she had a collapsed lung, like each breath actually choked her further.

At some point, EDI popped up on the terminal on the far war. She did not know how long she had been there for.

“Commander, I’ve noticed an increase in your heart rate as well as other signs of distress. Would you like me to send Doctor Chakwas or Kelly Chambers to assist?”

A different person kicked in then. It didn't make sense, even to her. She smiled and wiped at her face, sitting up. A pleasant persona overcame her. “I’m alright, EDI. Thank you for checking in, but there’s really no need to alert anyone.”

“You have a routine health inspection with Doctor Chakwas at 0900 hours tomorrow to evaluate the performance of your cybernetic implants. Will you still be attending that?” EDI asked.

She grit her teeth. “Of course. Thank you for the reminder.”

“I am happy to be of assistance.” And just like that, EDI flickered out of the display.

Her face fell immediately.

Somehow, she ended up crouched on the bathroom floor, shower running cold and pouring over her head. She was still dressed, still armored from the waist down, and feeling like she could sink to the bottom of an ocean. 

As the water poured over her face and into her eyes, she pulled her knees closer.

“My name is Raechel Shepard,” her voice cracked, sounding odd in the acoustics of the small room. 

She couldn’t finish it. Instead, she stood up, walked to the mirror, swiped a hand to clear a square in the condensation, and stared at herself for hours. The water kept running. 

* * *

  
  


The next day, after her appointment with Chakwas and a meeting with the Illusive Man, she headed to the CIC, dodging the concerned look of Kelly Chambers and went straight to the cockpit. When Joker spun around in his chair, it was with none of the usual flare he had had since assuming command of the SR-2. Normally, he’d whisk around with some sarcastic comment before even making eye contact, squirming delightedly in the leather of this ship's pilot's chair without Alliance limitations for comfort. He just looked at her, almost like he had something to apologize for, and said hesitantly, “Hey, Commander. Crazy who you run into out there, huh?”

Raechel crossed her arms and looked at the floor. “I wish Ash were here. I think she’d yell at both of us to figure it out.”

Joker shifted uncomfortably in his chair again. “I mean, worth a try, right? I could try summoning her, but if she possesses me we’re gonna have _way_ more problems than...whatever the hell happened down there with Kaidan.” Then, he shook his head thoughtfully. “Anyway, she’d probably read you poetry, or want you to punch out your feelings. Or both at the same time.”

Surprising herself, she cracked a smile. “That _does_ sound like Ashley.” And then, she sighed. “She’d probably hate me too for being with Cerberus, though.”

“Ah, Commander, don’t make me talk about _feelings,”_ Joker said, pulling a face. “But, gah, you know Kaidan doesn’t hate you. I don’t think he _could_. Believe me, I saw more than enough of his lovesick looks at you on the original Normandy. Alliance didn’t pay me damn near enough for dealing with that.”

Raechel felt the heat rise in her cheeks. She had never confirmed to Joker or anyone in the crew the nature of her relationship with Kaidan, they had skirted the lines of propriety and command so well. But, of course it was transparent -- especially to Joker. “He and I didn’t play it nearly as subtly as we thought, huh?” In that moment, she felt almost casual, almost herself.

“No, ma’am,” Joker grinned.

“Can’t be changed now,” she shrugged. The conversation lulled as she stared at the shifting currents of space out the windows.

“I’ve got a feeling you didn’t come here for me to expose your dating history, though?” Joker asked. 

“I want you to plot a course.”

“Where to? Did you see the new set of dossiers? We’re gonna get Tali!”

“That’s definitely next, but…” She ran a hand through the unfamiliar blonde of her hair. “Omega Nebula. Amada System.”

“Commander…” Joker said quietly.

“Take me to Alchera, Joker,” she said, voice growing harder.

“Are you sure that’s --?”

“Yes.” The word fell hard between them, and her gaze turned into a kind of dare for him to defy her. They held each other’s stare before he nodded once.

“Yes, ma’am.”

* * *

When her boots hit the compacted ice on the ground, she wondered what it felt like, stepping out of the escape pods, waiting for a response to their distress signal. She tried to imagine the confusion, everyone running back and forth, trying to count crewmembers, trying to assess injuries. 

Kaidan, while worried about her, must have stayed in control. He was always so carefully measured. She imagined him holding his panic at bay to help others however he could. He was the kind of person to lean against, stable and unyielding in every storm.

But still, she imagined the way his breath, his world, his everything must have stopped when the final pod landed and only a crumpled, guilt-stricken Joker was inside. Had he waited even still with bated breath for some kind of miracle? Had he had that kind of faith in her, that no matter what, she would find a way, overcome the odds?

Or -- and she suspected this was more likely -- had he been a realist? Had he known then that there was no other way out, and that Joker’s face told the whole story? 

Had he been looking to the sky, allowing himself the foolishness to imagine just for a moment, that he could see her drifting among the stars? That if he could not hold her, he could hold the memory of her death?

She wondered herself if she had lit up in the atmosphere above them, if she had blazed like a comet in the sky for them to wish on. But she knew that wasn’t likely. She, without metaphor, simply was not large enough to make such an impact. 

She remembered a trade ship being shot out of the sky over Mindoir when the batarians made their descent. She remembered it raining fire over their settlement, each piece of debris another ribbon, another firework announcing their arrival. Many had abandoned their homes, doors open, and walked out into the open to stare at it. And it had only made them easier targets.

The sound of her own circulated breathing in her helmet was enough to rouse her from that unhelpful musing. She began looking around, encompassed in that deadly silence she had encountered days before on Horizon. It wrapped around her, pressed in on her. And she must have marched through it for miles, she walked back and forth so much. 

Finally, she paused, right in front of a sheer cliff, shaped like a waterfall had frozen over all in a single instant. It dropped off into shadows dozens of meters below. She closed her eyes.

And then, with a wild thought, she reached both hands up to her helmet. And she deftly keyed at the pressurization, and pulled. It started to hiss wildly, all of her oxygen and heat forcing their way out into this lifeless abyss. An alarm went off, beeping frantically in the helmet.

“Commander, the atmosphere of Alchera is not sustainable to human life --” EDI’s voice cut in over the headset. 

“I know, EDI. Override.”

Choking on the air, dry and cold, her eyes began to sting and water. Blinking furiously, her coughs grew more frantic, the winds whipping her face into numbness. 

She couldn’t tell you why she was doing it, just that she needed to hang in the balance, here, again. Part of her wanted to reach for her neck like her suit was leaking again, wanted to flail and lurch in the silence of death that had gotten her once before. She wanted to be both puppet and puppetmaster. She tried to remember the exact sensation of dying, tried to remember every thought and worry and wish and prayer --

Her vision was getting spotty. Slamming the helmet back on, she felt it pressurize, and her screaming lungs seemed confused for a moment before her breathing resumed. Her face still stung. But she was here. She was breathing. Her air wasn’t leaking out into the atmosphere.

Taking a step back, she suddenly crumpled, all the way to her knees. She looked at the ground, at her hands that were flexing for want of movement.

And she let out a sob.

“My name...is Raechel Shepard. I am --” she panted “-- I am thirty-one years old. Even if those two years were not lived, I am here. My parents were farmers. I had four older brothers. I like to play piano. I can’t cook. I...I have been to Earth.” She was weeping now, not caring if EDI or even Joker could hear her. Her final words were messy, wet, awkward, though still true. She imagined the water over Vancouver Bay, the way Kaidan had described it to her as they had dozed off to sleep the night before Ilos. “It was beautiful.”

Raechel stayed like that a few minutes, staring into the abyss. Grappling with the larger monster that was her own death.

Then, she stood. And she began walking again.

At some point, walking through what was once the mess hall, something caught her eye. A pair of dog tags caught the light, somehow wrapped around what appeared to have been a light fixture. She ran to them, cradled them in her arms. Flipping them over, she read the name. It was a crewman from the lower decks she had spoken with a couple times, an eager young man. Like Jenkins.

Sitting down in the ice again, she held them tight in her gloved palm. And she said a prayer for his soul, for his memory that she now clung to.

There must have been other dog tags, she thought, visible somewhere. And she would find them. 

And she did. A few more, at least. It took hours. Her body ached beneath the weight of her heavy armor, and her helmet fogged up with her crying. She tried to pull up a face to each name, tried to remember their voice. With each one, she prayed. 

And with each prayer, she felt...better wasn’t the right word. But closer to _her,_ closer to that immovable thing at the center of her being that distinguished her _._ These were her first real prayers of her second life, she realized. Maybe that meant something about her. That she was closer to living again.

She wondered where her own dog tags were. If they had stuck with her body all the way to her recovery by Cerberus, or if they had been found. Or if they were drifting through space like she should have been.

_No, not_ _should have been_. She didn’t want to believe that anymore. 

Maybe...after this, if she wasn’t court martialed for treason for working with Cerberus, and, then, if she even survives...Maybe she could one day be fully reinstated. She could get new dog tags and run her finger along the indentation of her name as she repeated it to herself.

Maybe...Maybe a _lot_ of things could still happen, she supposed.

Alchera’s three moons were visible in the sky that was growing darker. All three of them at once. According to the ship database, the moons were named after Australian Aboriginal concepts of Dreamtime. Raechel had to admit, she knew very little about it. But maybe that was good --There was so much about Earth, about humans, about the universe, still to learn. Maybe she would spend tonight reading about Dreamtime. 

Maybe she felt alive enough to still _want_ to learn more.

So she walked back to the shuttle to return -- at last -- to the Normandy.

* * *

  
  


Back in her quarters, she showered for a long time, feeling guilty about how much of the ship’s water she must have been using the last few days. Raechel looked in the mirror, at her bleached hair now straw-colored in the wet clumps at her shoulders. She imagined it her vibrant red again, imagined the way it glowed in the sun. 

She wasn’t quite there yet, but she could be. Maybe once this was all over, once she’d seen the other side of the Omega-4 Relay...She would see nothing but herself in the mirror. Her body was already looking more like her own.

As she wrapped a towel around her and walked out into the room, she thought about getting some fish for the tank on the wall, just to have something living to care for. She dressed herself with more care than she had gotten used to. 

And when Raechel sat down at her desk, thinking of where to read about Dreamtime, or what vid to watch before she fell asleep, she saw she had a new message waiting in her inbox. Part of her wanted to ignore it, thinking it was another spam message, but she knew the notification would bother her.

So, she clicked to it, and froze at the subject line. “About Horizon…” Her fingers could not move fast enough, trembling as she opened it. And, as she read it, she could practically hear Kaidan’s voice behind her, could hear all of his fatigue and his aching openness. He told her about how much he suffered with her loss, how he tried to move on, and how cautious he was. But, most importantly, beneath it all, she could feel the tentative hope beneath his words. It wasn’t a severing of ties, and it wasn’t a hand extended, but it was...a maybe.

Just as she had felt all day. A world of maybes. A _future_ of maybes. 

Raechel read it over what must have been a dozen times. There was anger, still, of course, beneath it all, but...there was so much more, too. She looked to the photograph beside her, to his strong jaw and measured gaze, to the face she imagined more than any other.

And she wrote her reply.

* * *

  
  


> **RE: About Horizon…**
> 
> **From: Raechel Shepard**
> 
> **To: Kaidan Alenko**
> 
> Kaidan,
> 
> I went to Alchera today. I've known where the crash site is ever since I woke up in a lab a couple months ago, but couldn't bring myself to do a damn thing about it until I saw you. I didn’t know how to respond to you until I set foot there, weirdly enough. Even with everything that happened and everything you said on Horizon, you reminded me of something I don't think I would have remembered otherwise: I'm alive. 
> 
> I found every set of dog tags I could. I spent hours digging through the rubble, but I could have spent more there. I don’t know why I’m telling you this; maybe because you’ve seen the planet in _this_ lifetime. It’s quieter than I thought it would be. I last saw it from the inside of my fogged up helmet as I screamed helplessly while the oxygen leaked from my suit.  
>   
> Yeah, I remember that. I remember dying, just like I remember so much of being alive. How _dare_ _you_ ask if I remember the night before Ilos? It _did_ mean as much to me, Kaidan. And, for me, it was just a few months ago.
> 
> I’m sorry about all the time you lost, and about what you went through. I lost time, too, and my own damn right to choose. My biotics? Those weren’t my choice, and neither was Cerberus being the ones to play G-d and resurrect me. 
> 
> But yes, I _did_ choose to keep working with them. I don’t expect you to readily -- or ever -- forgive me for that. I’m sorry. I really, truly am. But I keep thinking about the bodies on Mindoir of my parents and brothers and friends and schoolteachers and rabbi. If I can save just one colony from an invasion...it’s worth it. That’s where I’m coming from.
> 
> And as for where I’m going...I’ve been thinking about this as a suicide mission, that I was brought back to life to send the Collectors to their maker and maybe make peace with mine as I go down with them.
> 
> I’m starting to rethink that.
> 
> Like you said, though, I just don’t know anything about the future. Except one prayer I have for it: that you are safe.
> 
> \-- Raechel

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!


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